When A Home Is Not A House
I was driving around the countryside tonight, having some “me” time, looking at the Christmas lights strung around on houses, trees, etc. I started thinking about a friend who lives in a big city, wishing that he could drive around with me and see all this because he really doesn’t get to see stuff like this. Sure, big cities have all kinds of cool things that we don’t have here in the mountains too, but not houses with every square inch covered in blinking lights and hollow plastic reindeer. I’m sure most big cities have neighborhoods where you can see this stuff, but what about where there are no houses? What about a place like New York City. What do they do?
It dawned on me in thinking this through that there are no houses in New York City. At least in all the pictures I have seen of NYC, there are no houses. I mean places where only one family lives and it’s not attached to some other place, has a yard. You know..a house. Now, I understand that there are real house houses on the suburbs like Brooklyn and Queens, but are there any in New York City proper? I don’t think so.
I hope I’m wrong and that there are houses in NYC. Because wouldn’t that be wierd? A place where more people live than any other part of the country and not a single house. Sure, I know that rich people like Donald Trump and others live in huge apartments that have more than one floor and probably five time the square footage of the average American house house. But they can’t just walk out the front door and sit in the grass, or run out to the driveway to get something they left in the car. They can’t set up a grill under the willow tree out back. They have to walk down the hall and get on an elevator, go down to the lobby, have the door opened by a security guy, get a cab to central park, then sit in the grass. That’s a lot of trouble just to relax.
It makes since nowadays that there are no houses proper in NYC. Just consider how many people there are in one place. If I remember my high school history correctly, Manhattan Island is on 17 square miles. That’s not much space for 10 million people. So it only stands to reason that nobody gets their own roof. And that rich people live on the roof. But where there ever houses in New York? Even old pictures I see of New York are of buildings, buildings, buildings. I’ve seen pictures of row houses, but they don’t count becuase they are all attached to each other. I’m sure there were houses at some point in the timeline of Manhattan, but its almost as if the Dutch people wiped out the tee-pees and started throwing up skyscrapers immediately.
So, since people in New York don’t really have their own rooflines and hedges and sidewalks to freely express their holiday cheer, what do they do? Do they decorated the hell out of their windows in hopes that someone 80 stories below might get a glimpse? No, I have heard that real New Yorkers never look up, that that is a sign of a tourist. Maybe people in New York, just share their mega-watt splendor with their “neighbors” on the same floor. Their apartment doors trimmed out in tinsel and blinking lights. A light-up nativity sitting next to their entry.
Or maybe people in New York just keep their decorating to themselves, just for the joy of their families or friends who pay a visit. I would add the carolers that they invite in for hot chocolate and sugar cookies. But I imagine New Yorkers are letting strangers in their apartments, let alone feeding them. Plus, how would carolers get past the security guy. I guess carolers just go to buildings like you see on NYPDBlue where you press and intercom and they sing “Joy To The World” into the squawk-box.
Maybe it’s best that NYers don’t have such an easy way to display their Christmas glitter. Because it can get out of control. People trying to out-do each other. Adding more lights than the previous year. Struggling to animate the reindeer without blowing a transformer somewhere. Or my favorite: getting so out of control with the light-up figures that, in an effort to keep the true meaning of Christmas alive through all the commericalism and gaudiness, you put out a navity display that has Santa kneeling at the manger. I have actually seen that. No joke.
I’m sure that whatever they do in New York, they do it only as New Yorkers could (and are very proud of that fact). But I bet they don’t have those newly popular nylon blow-up lighted figures like the rest of us. Imagine that New York. A few yards of nylon, a 100 watt bulb, and an air compressor: now, that’s Christmas! 